I have been an LPN for 20 years. I had a complaint filed against me with the AZ nursing board in Apr 2013, alleging that I refused or failed to provide care to three separate clients on three separate occasions. Apparently they have been sending communication to my old address, so I didn’t receive it until now. I have 10 days to get my written response in and then I have an appointment with the investigator scheduled in June to review everything. Shortest version possible, a person with a vendetta submitted a false report. Longer version is after the questions if you want to read a little more and give me any feedback. THANK YOU!
So my questions and my concerns:
1. Has anyone gone thru having a false report made and how the heck did you handle it?
2. Will the nursing board/investigator allow me to discuss the whole story with this guy? Or just focus on the allegation?
3. I don’t have any documentation. I wrote nursing notes on the first two clients on the day the incidents occurred. Can I request those to be obtained by the board since I can’t access them?
4. I did provide care to the client that was hit by the car. He walked into the clinic and I checked him over, called 911 and he saw the provider after the fire dept left. If a client gets hit by a car in the street, outside of the clinic would I be I required to provide care anyway? I don’t think that I would be legally required to leave the facility I am working in to provide first aid to an injured person off site. Right? If a nurse is working a floor shift and a guy gets hit by a car outside, he/she isn’t expected to leave their facility to care for them right?
Basically- do we have a legal obligation to provide care for a client outside of the facility? If so, to what extent?

To make a very long story short, I worked in a methadone clinic from 2006-2014. I am very policy driven and worked my way up to the lead nurse position over 3 clinics in the state. Eventually there was conflict between a myself and a manager who had been at his clinic for over 10 years. I began noticing a lot of violations of policy as far as privilege levels, diversion checks, a clear lack of therapeutic boundaries, ignoring drug screen results on special clients, he would leave work and return smelling of marijuana etc etc. As I brought these issues to the medical provider and administration, mysteriously the complaints from his clients against me started increasing (around June of 2012). I went from having one or two grievances a month (we saw 500 patients a day so that’s a pretty low ratio) to having at least 4 or 5 a week! Most of the clients were on his caseload. So to summarize the most stressful two year period of my life…I had become a target. I felt as though I had poked a hornet’s nest. This manager eventually caused his own demise by totally messing up a bomb threat evacuation where he ignored admin instructions and sent all the staff home, failed to secure the building and did not set the alarm. When admin investigated this, they demoted him and transferred him to another clinic as a counselor. He just stopped coming to work one day. This was around around the time the complaint was filed in Apr 2013.
The allegations on my complaint are from incidents with three of his clients. All three are completely false. In fact, I don’t even recall one of the situations. The allegations are pretty severe in my opinion…one accuses me of “REFUSING to call 911 for a client who had passed out at a bus stop down the street from the clinic and was having difficulty breathing”, one alleges that I “failed to assist a patient who was hit by a car after leaving the facility” and the third “failed to assist a patient who was having difficulty breathing due to an allergic reaction to a medication”. Clearly to me it is a retaliation complaint. However, I was terminated by this company in May of 2014 for having too many client complaints.

I would definitely find a lawyer. They are experts at knowing what to include and what isn’t pertinent because they deal with this all the time.
Some states do require that nurses and other medically trained personnel stop and aide injured outside of a care setting (like being hit by a car), I would check your state nursing laws. However, if you were at work, leaving your patients to aide another person may have put your patients at risk, which would help support you not leaving work. Also, I know most facilities have a policy that you need to be clocked out to leave the grounds, so you would have had to make sure you could go on break, clock out, then help the injured.
The back story of why this person who has filed so many grievances against you may help to support why the did so. I would definitely bring this up with the investigator/lawyer.